Biomedical document-level relation extraction poses significant challenges beyond sentence-level tasks, as it necessitates the integration of evidence from entire documents and the ability for coherent cross-sentence reasoning. While pretrained language models (PLMs) demonstrate efficiency in handling local contexts, they often struggle with global dependency modeling. Conversely, large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities but tend to generate hallucinations in knowledge-intensive biomedical domains. This paper introduces CoRE, a novel cascade framework that leverages the complementary strengths of PLMs and LLMs through a detect-then-rethink paradigm. The PLM serves as an efficient detector for high-confidence relations, while challenging cases are forwarded to an LLM enhanced with semantic retrieval and iterative reasoning mechanisms. Experimental results on BioRED and CDR datasets show that CoRE achieves substantial improvements over state-of-the-art baselines, validating the effectiveness of the proposed cascade paradigm for complex biomedical relation extraction.

Temporality is crucial in understanding the course of clinical events from a patient’s electronic health recordsand temporal processing is becoming more and more important for improving access to content. SemEval 2017 Task 12 (Clinical TempEval) addressed this challenge using the THYME corpus, a corpus of clinical narratives annotated with a schema based on TimeML2 guidelines. We developed and evaluated approaches for: extraction of temporal expressions (TIMEX3) and EVENTs; EVENT attributes; document-time relations. Our approach is a hybrid model which is based on rule based methods, semi-supervised learning, and semantic features with addition of manually crafted rules.